John--since you're always talking about love and Catholicism, what's your take on Messiaen? He's one of my favorite composers.

don't know his work well enough to have much of a take - last time I heard him I enjoyed it but that's really all I can say

Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps (Quartet for the End of Time) is seriously the SHIT. He composed it while interred in a concentration camp for the only instruments around: violin, cello, piano and clarinette. It's a very haunting piece.

we should start a classical music thread somewhere, but i guess here is kool-aid too.

so lately I have been very into violin adagios, in particular Violin Concerto in D major, op.35, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Orchestral Suite No.3 in D major, "Air on a G string", Johann Sebastian Bach

we should start a classical music thread somewhere, but i guess here is kool-aid too.

so lately I have been very into violin adagios, in particular Violin Concerto in D major, op.35, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Orchestral Suite No.3 in D major, "Air on a G string", Johann Sebastian Bach

And Korngold is an interesting figure when you're tracing the change from 19th century Romanticism to 20th centry whatever (is it still "modernism" if it's 50-years-old?). He was from a German-Jewish family in Brno, in Moravia. He went to Vienna to study. This is just like Mahler and Freud and others who were born in predominently Slavic areas of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Korngold was a child prodigy who wrote music much more like R. Strauss during an era we more remember for Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg.

Listen to Die Todt Stadt. Awesome opera of his.

It's funny to think how important prominent Jews were in the cultural life of Vienna at this time, while there was simultaneously a kind of modernisation of anti-Semitism in politics from Karl Luger who was the mayor. I feel a little embarassed bringing this up while there's someone posting from Vienna. I mostly know what I read in books...

Anyway, Korngold fled Austria before the Anschluss with the Nazis, and wound up in LA writing film music. LA in the late 40s and 50s sounds pretty funny, what with all the intellectuals running around. Schoenberg all pissed because tours of the stars passing his house to go to Shirley Temple's next door. Adorno trying to break into screenwriting.

I don't know how this fits into the whole Wagner/R. Strauss stuff, but I figure it was really hard to justify leaving unless you were Jewish. Perhaps Nazism just looked like a more aggressive form of political and cultural currents that had been around, especially when it just started. That's why it's so dangerous, I think, because complacency was crucial to its rise.

Also, it's interesting that Toscanini who said he'd never play Strauss's work. Toscanini was a proud and brave anti-Fascist who stood up publicly to Mussolini at a time when not many others did. He was also a dick.

Sorry y'all had to bear the brunt of my undergrad flashbacks. This is my first time on these forums, and I like them a lot.